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Writing Beyond Resurrection

In conventional terms, the task of the actor is one of breathing life into a given script,

enlivening the already written such that it has a presence in the present. Written past

participle of the verb to write, time lapsed from the live of writing; living languagemomentarily suspended as the noun of letters congealing across the page. The actor (and

indeed a texts reader) re-animates the written form with the experience of the temporal,

pulse and breath of time itself. Allowing it to live again, to be lived again. Resurrection

the act of rising from the dead. Revival restoration to life or vitality, a re-

awakening. Perhaps live art involves an attempt to bypass the process of resurrection or

restitution, the cultivation of tactics through which language is left live, kept alive, or

otherwise retains the properties of living.

At times, the performance itself becomes a script of sorts for eliciting the unexpected

gasps and phatic speech acts of the audience. Here, certain utterances can only be hoped

for, cannot be rehearsed: laughters rising; the sound of empathy exhaled in collective

breath, sharp intake of surprise, comfort suddenly unsettled. Other utterances are rather

hoped avoided: twittering whisper of disengagement; muffled mobile calls; untimely

giggles; bored yawns, that recurrent cough. Or perhaps the audience isthe script, anunruly bundle of triggers and prompts against which the performer rallies. Live

performance less a text to be read then, as an unpredictable assemblage of potential

cues and provocations. At times, a language void of written language, performed in the

absence of written script, wordless even, mute. A language of gesture and of movement,

of visual phrase and breaths spacing: writing of the body. Or else the script remainspurposefullypresent, comment on the pretense of theatre, its habitual hiding of writingslines. Deconstruction of the construct, of a system whose audience is coaxed to forget

the physical presence of written script, attend only to the live of spoken words unfolding.

Or attention might be drawn to the back-stage texts of performance, its stage directions,

notational inscriptions, instructional cues, the rules of the game. Indeed, there are times

when rules are being written (live) as the game is being played; new languages emerge

only through the process of being spoken. Live unfurling of an immanent language, a

coming into language. Intimate words conjured at the interstice between performer and

guest, a conversational duet; embodied co-production. Or maybe the visibly present

script signals a making-visible of the improvisatory act of translation, the kairoticart ofthe live re-mix or edit, the weave of text fragments already known or written, reworked

towards the still unknown, order unrepeatable. Kairos quality of timeliness or of timingin speech and action, the capacity for seizing opportunities; art of speaking and listening

at one and the same time. Practice of receptivity and of invention the performativity

of a language open to what the changing situation affords.

Live language. Language gleaned from life. Cuts and extracts from the everyday, from

conversations overheard or witnessed. Spoken testimony an attesting to experience

and to the experiential, to the live event of being-there. Live-ness of a voice still touchedin the present by the recollection of an encounter now past, and the live-ness of an

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encounter with that voice, there in the dark. Fragility. Mortality. Humanity. Time passed

and time still passing. Where is the present tense of language: in the act of speaking or of

listening? Technology has enabled the possibility of a gap or lag in transmission between

speech and its reception; the speaker and listener no longer must share space or time.

There are certain events and speech acts that cross time zones or geographies, that

somehow retain their presence, their urgency; their perpetual sense of now. Temporalloopholes. Words spoken back then, heard now. There, now here. Recorded voice can be

felt in the present as though it were not of the past. Its significance can accrue over time,

becoming morevivid, poignant, more vital and alive as the years pass by. Living is acondition open to change and growth, to evolving and adapting. An archival tendency

often strives to stop this process still in its tracks, capture documents for posterity. So

what constitutes a living archive? Performance/document. Live/dead. Binary definitions

miss nuance. Technologies can display a live-ness of their own; live performance can

sometimes lack pulse. Live might not always be lively; there is agency in action and

inaction. Between one state and another, there is a range of possibility.A: zone of theneutral prefix, law of opposites paused.Atemporal time suspended, freed from thelimitations of chronological time.Alive: a suspended state of live-ness, neither whollylive nor lifeless. There are forms of practice that willfully inhabit these intervals and

indeterminacies. Like writing?

Technology creates the conditions for new forms of live writing, the incessant babbling

of real-time commentary, compression of the feedback loop such that reflection happens

live to the event itself. Yet without sufficient gap or distance, reflection might lack depth,

performed as the act of simply reflecting back, like a mirror, repeating,rather thanreflecting on. Reflection (on) is an art of meditation, thought oscillating between the

exterior realm of stimulus and the interior realm of response; hinge between self and

world, past and present, known and not-yet-known. Reflection from reflectere: to bend,to turn away. To reflect on live-ness is a troublesome pursuit, requiring ones attention is

kept on the present (now), whilst at the same time bent back, turned elsewhere. So, how

to write of live-ness, of live art? How can the fixity of words on the page meet the

experience of that which is endlessly disappearing as soon as it is coming into being?

This is not just a question for live performance, for live art, but arguably also a writers

preoccupation in and of itself. Let me tell you says Clarice Lispector, Im trying to

seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that its already gone becauseits already become a new instant-now thats also already gone.1Here, a writing not

wanting to be written (then resurrected by the reader), but rather striving to remain

writing: And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away

and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now.2

Copyright Emma Cocker, December 2014.Text commissioned by Compass Live Artfor forthcoming publication.No part of this text can be reproduced without the authors permission. not-yet-there.blogspot.com

1 Clarice Lispector,gua Viva, (New Directions, 2012), originally published in 1973, p.3.2 Lispector, pp.3 4.